Content marketing on Facebook, YouTube and WPP – Content24

Welcome to Content24. Why is it different? Because it’s a digest of the stories that have made an impact over the past 24 hours, and not just a platform for recycled content marketing. Today we’re looking at Facebook v YouTube, WPP and journalistic snobbery towards content marketing

Facebook to eat YouTube’s content marketing lunch

Facebook is out to take a chunk of YouTube’s action. This analysis by Adweek examines what happened when Chubbies, an online clothing brand, ran its video content marketing on both channels.

The brand put out a 30-second video aiming to popularise men’s shorts. After one day, the video had reached 11,000 views on Facebook compared to 300 on YouTube. Another clip of men squeezed into pairs of small shorts was posted on Facebook on June 19. It has so far reached 900,000 views, 3,600 likes and nearly 1,000 shares. Posted on YouTube in July, it has only reached 3,100 views.

This is nothing new. We’ve written before how Facebook – and others – are looking at video as a way forward. Facebook Instant is an example of this strategy.

Currently, YouTube is the preeminent channel for content marketing. However, all market leaders get complacent at some stage and fail to react to challenger brands. Maybe YouTube Red will provide an answer to this.

WPP and its content marketing plan

One of the most tedious tasks in journalism is to wade through a financial report.

However, we thought it would be worth taking a quick scan through WPP’s third quarter to see if there is anything of relevance to content marketing.

WPP chief executive Sir Martin Sorrell has been out and about recently, talking about changes to the marcomms sector. Remember his company has recently launched a content marketing agency called Truffle Pig.

Other acquisitions by WPP include ABS Creative, a medical content marketing agency, and Six Degrees, a content marketing and PR firm in India. The report states that it invested $1.3 billion in content, data and technology over the period.

One interesting point is the growing client focus on ways in which “technology, use of data and content” might be employed to generate better targeted content – a likely growth area for the industry.

There is also an infographic – part of a “four strategic priorities” section – that shows how the various strands of its offering link up. Content marketing is in there somewhere; the question is whether it works as part of an overall brand campaign.

Journalism and free stuff

On the other side of the journalistic coin… freebie trips abroad are certainly more enjoyable than trawling through an annual report. This Media Week comment piece – Why content should not be the sole domain of journalists – looks at what it describes as the snobbish view of editors towards content marketing.

It takes as an example that holy grail of journo ligging, the hotel/resort/airline review…